Graduated University, building a new Obsidian plugin, and notes on Excellent Advice for Living & The Pragmatic Programmer

Hey friends,

I hope you've had a great week.

A lot has happened since my last email. I graduated with my Master’s in Software Engineering!

I've been working on a project to improve NASA's Mars mission models using AI and machine learning. We achieved exactly what we hoped for with this project. We recreated their current models for analysing rock samples and then developed new, more accurate ones using the latest machine learning techniques. These models performed really well and the techniques we used ended up serving as inspiration for the work they’re doing on the missions going forward.

It has been a fantastic experience working on my thesis along with two of my friends and long-time collaborators. Our collaboration with the members of the missions and supervisors was incredibly exciting, and I learned a lot during the project.

And it was fun to make the local news to top off the year-long project: AAU (EN), TV2 Nord (DA), LinkedIn (DA) / EN, and others.

Now I’m enjoying a summer-vacation to take a quick breather before going on my next adventure. I’m headed to Rome, Italy tomorrow to spend time and enjoy life with my fantastic partner.

While I have been enjoying the summer, I’m also not the type of person that can just turn off their mind and sit back. I have a ton of exciting things I want to show you, so let’s dive in!

What I've made for you

Book notes

Article

I wrote and published my Summer Paper Reading List 2024. It’s a curated list of key papers on machine learning, neural networks, transformers, and distributed systems.

If you have any recommendations, let me know!

New Obsidian plugin: Voice-controlled Obsidian with AI

I’m having a lot of fun building a new plugin for Obsidian.
It’s the AI-assistant I’ve always wanted.
Something that… just works. Ask for what you want, and it goes and does it.

• Want it to create a new note on the economies of scale? Just ask.

• Want it to listen to what you’re saying and write down your thoughts as bullet points, but add tasks along the way based on what you said? Just ask.

• Want it to add some thoughts under a specific heading, but you’re currently working on another paragraph? Just ask.

I’ve really been enjoying actually talking to my notes. I’ve used it extensively for journaling. It’s freeing to just talk free-form, and then it all appears in beautifully formatted text.

The plugin is currently in private beta. I’ll be opening access soon!

PodNotes for Obsidian

PodNotes is the plugin I’ve built for Obsidian that acts as a fully-fledged podcast app within Obsidian.

I recently made it even better:

QuickAdd for Obsidian

QuickAdd's AI Assistant now supports:

• the new GPT-4o-mini model, featuring 128k input tokens & 16k output tokens

• Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 8k output tokens (beta)

Notably, GPT-4o-mini is super cheap, running at 15 cents / 1m input tokens and 60 cents / 1m output tokens.

Updated Zotero Importer

What else?

I’ve rebuilt my website in Astro. I was getting a bit tired of the build times of my Next.js website, and have been wanting to fix it. Nothing wrong with Next.js, I still really like it, but it didn’t fit the use-case of a static blog as well as Astro.
And there’s the nice benefit of it being easier to manage the content I’ve published.

Something that really sparks joy on the new website is the books page.
There’s just something beautiful about seeing your favourite books laid out together. Maybe this fascination is why I love browsing bookshops and libraries.
And it’s the closest I get, being a mostly-digital reader.

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